


Finding the Not-Place

by the_wordbutler



Category: Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, HSAU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-01-04
Packaged: 2017-11-23 14:30:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mr. Goren and Officer Eames are people who talk about books and art, people who tell stories in the hallway, and people who drink coffee. </p><p>Because that's how it all starts: with coffee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding the Not-Place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Perpetual Motion (perpetfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perpetfic/gifts).



> Written as part of the Manhattan Prep universe, which was created by perpetual motion. The story which started it all can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/586303/chapters/1053738).
> 
> There is some strong language in this story, including a homophobic epithet.

It all starts the day she brings him coffee.

She’s asked him out for coffee twice before but he’s said no both times. She’s Alexandra Eames, thirty-two and Irish, and works as Manhattan Preparatory Academy’s police liaison. She works at the school, she lives at the school, she eats, sleeps, and breathes the school.

Like Bobby. 

Like Bobby, but Bobby is not thirty-two. Bobby’s older and he looks at the gray in his hair when he gets up in the morning and knows why the students call him “Goofy Goren”, because he looks like a Saturday morning cartoon’s mad professor. He teaches literature and German language, and even though he eats, sleeps, and breathes the school, he’s not exactly going-out-for-coffee-with-the-police-liaison material.

The first time she asked him, it was after an hour-long conversation in the hallway about books set in the antebellum south, her favorite genre (specifically, “ones that aren’t crappy plantation love stories”).

The second time she asked him, it was after he’d helped break up a fistfight between two over-zealous freshmen who liked the same girl (specifically, she’d asked him for drinks). 

He’d said no both times. But that had been a month and two days earlier.

“Hey,” she says, and holds out a paper cup of coffee. 

He’s been in his classroom for all the time it takes to cross the threshold, and she’s in jeans and a ribbed t-shirt and has her hair back and looks – well. She doesn’t look like a cop, except she has her stun gun on her belt. And her pepper spray. And her badge.

He tilts his head to get a good look at her. “Hey,” he says, after a healthy pause. 

“I thought you might like coffee.” When he doesn’t take it from her, she sets it on the corner of his desk. “I went to the indy place on the corner. You said you liked it.”

“Did I?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“I – yeah.” He remembers all their conversations, but he can’t tell her that. He remembers her crack about being prom queen in high school, he remembers stories about her father, he remembers that her favorite non-fiction book is _Thunderstruck_ and that she didn’t like _Devil in the White City_ , which is funny because she’s always wanted to go to the Sears Tower. He’d told her about the coffee shop three weeks before she asked him out for coffee. He didn’t figure she’d go. 

He looks at the cup and then at her. “Thanks,” he finally says.

“You’re welcome.” She grins at him. “Faulkner?”

“I – “ He glances at the board. They’re reading _The Sound and the Fury_ , and he’s not yet erased the scribbled notes on the timeline from the blackboard. “You know it?”

“I liked Faulkner in college.” She puts her hands on her hips and appraises the board. “Not _The Sound and the Fury_ , though. _Absalom, Absalom!_ was my favorite.”

“The characters in _The Sound and the Fury_ parallel Thomas,” Bobby says, not really looking away from his notes. He can’t even tell half of what he’s written. “Downfall, empire, the idea of building up something and the risk of losing all of that – those are the stories that Faulkner told. Not your structured plantation stories.”

He means it as a joke and smiles slightly as he looks over at Alex, and she’s grinning at him. At least, until her walkie-talkie goes off, Anita’s voice half-garbled. She tugs it off her belt and while she talks, Bobby puts his bag down and picks up the coffee. He doesn’t drink it, just smells, and he can tell it’s the expensive kind at the shop. Meaning that she’s picked it out especially, meaning – 

“I have to go,” she says, and he watches how her fingers move to clip the walkie-talkie back onto her hip. “Someone broke into Fontana’s car again. Probably a kid who flunked calc, but she called the real cops in anyway.” 

“Oh.” His attention wanes and he forces himself to look away from the line of her hip. “We can talk more. About Faulkner, at a later date, maybe. I enjoy talking about literature.”

“I know.” She starts for the door without saying goodbye, because that’s the other thing he’s noticed: she never says – 

“Eames.”

She stops in the doorway and turns around. 

“I – thank you. For the coffee. It was… Thank you.”

Her smile is bright. It makes his fingers drum against the paper cup, strumming with their own energy.

“You’re welcome, Bobby.”

 

==

 

“What are you _drinking_?”

Munch says it with complete disgust and Bobby looks up from his normal lunch – whatever the cafeteria is serving, plus a book (this week, he’s re-reading _Faust_ as part of an advanced course he’s going to teach next semester) – just in time to watch him pluck up the paper cup from that morning and peer into it. “Coffee from this morning? Are you disgusting? Do you know how much dust can get into a cup like this? Never mind that all the waxy crap they put inside is melting right into your coffee. You’re going to try to digest this and have the runs for a month.”

“Like cafeteria food ain’t gonna do that to you.” Coach Tutuola drops into his seat and starts in on his tacos. 

Munch isn’t so easily beaten and Bobby has to reach for his cup. “It’s coffee.”

“From this morning.” He holds the cup out of reach and sinks into his own seat. “Since when have you stopped at Perk Place before work anyway? You don’t get up early enough.”

“It’s – someone brought it.” 

“Someone brought you coffee?” Munch glances over at Fin. “Did you hear that?”

Fin grins. “I heard it.”

“You’ve got yourself an _admirer_.”

Bobby shoots him a dirty look and takes his cup back. It’s not the same coffee from the morning, it’s from the machine in his room, but it’s the same paper cup. He doesn’t even know why he’s still using it, and he wants to claim ease, but it’s not just ease and he knows it. “It’s just… It’s coffee. People drink coffee without it meaning something. People just drink coffee.”

“Not ass-old coffee out of a paper cup.” Fin steals one of Munch’s tortilla chips and Bobby watches Munch attempt to stab him with his spork. There’s something comfortable about the way they banter and it makes him turn back to his own spork because how do you respond to that? He doesn’t have that, not with a student or a colleague or even, really, a friend, and even if Munch sometimes harasses him, it’s not the same thing. He’s safely in his own niche. It’s his. It’s comfortable. It’s – 

“Is anyone sitting here?” Alex asks.

Bobby nearly knocks his paper cup over onto his tray when he sees her standing there, with a tray, but she’s not talking to him. She’s talking to George, who is a seat over, and George moves his things around to clear a space. “To what do we owe this pleasure?” he asks with a smile. George smiles easily. The girls and boys who take his psychology class like him, even if the girls are in for a disappointment.

“I usually have a detention or two at lunch, but they’ve been good today.” She opens a packet of pepper onto her taco. “I’m waiting for the other three horsemen.”

George laughs and jokes in response but Bobby isn’t listening. There’s one chair of distance between them and that means he’s almost as close as he ever is to Alex, and it’s hard to concentrate on anything when she’s an arm’s length away. She’s taken her hair down but it’s over her shoulder and he can follow the line of her neck. 

She has a very nice neck. 

He’s thinking about this and pushing Spanish rice around on his plate when a voice close to his ear says, “If you keep undressin’ her with your eyes, we’re _all_ gonna see it.”

He jerks his head up and it’s Fin leaning close to him. He meets his eyes and then glances at his plate, embarrassed. He’s a grown man and he’s embarrassed. It’s a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and he suddenly wishes he had water to chase it away instead of coffee. 

In a paper cup. 

*

For three days, or maybe four, Bobby doesn’t see Alex. He doesn’t go out of his way to see her or not see her, he just doesn’t. It happens sometimes – she gets busy, he gets busy – and now that he’s drinking out of his mug again, he’s thinking about her. The thoughts are cyclical: he thinks about their friendship, about her hair and the line of her neck, about Munch and Fin’s cynicism and then about his friendship with her all over again, a collection of disjointed ideas that never really bond into something cohesive. 

He wants them to be cohesive, though. He lies in bed at night and he thinks about how he’s always noticed her smile and her intellect but how she’s never really seemed to notice his, and how it all feels a bit like being one of the students: Rey Curtis, writing his Shakespeare paper on the longing in the sonnets, because he knows longing and has never been able to translate it into _having_.

It’s early on the day he sees her again, or at least, early enough that the halls are almost entirely empty and the sun throws weird shadows down the corridor. Students don’t start until at least eight in the morning, and usually Bobby strolls into his classroom at five to, but they’re starting a new book and he has to erase the board and put up a few discussion questions before he can toss copies of _Turn of the Screw_ on their desks. He’s just about to turn the last corner towards his classroom when he hears Alex’s voice echoing off cinderblock and tile: 

“Are you really going to feed me that line?”

He takes the last step around the corner to see that Alex has backed one of the new kids, a football player with shoulders twice the width of Alex’s widest point, against the wall. At least, ideally, she has. The kid stands stick-straight and isn’t backing down. There’s a bag on the floor and a couple markers, too. Blue and green, the same colors as the obscenities that have been turning up on bathroom stalls and desks through the school, informing students of things like VAN BUREN’S A DYKE and FONTANA LICKS BRISCOE’S ASSHOLE. 

The kid rolls his eyes. “Isn’t no line.”

“It’s not? Then I suppose the fact that you have a bag full of markers is just a coincidence.”

“I’m an artist.”

“Funny, I don’t know anyone who calls that art.”

“Guess everybody’s a fuckin’ critic.” He raises his chin a half-inch and then moves to step around her. “I gotta get to class.”

In one deft side-step, Alex is in front of him again, and she raises her head to look him in the eye. It’s the first time that Bobby realizes she’s not wearing her stun gun, pepper spray, and walkie-talkie; she’s in jogging clothes and looks like she hadn’t meant to end up nose-to-nose with one of the biggest kids on campus. 

She says nothing.

“Look, lady,” he challenges, “I gotta go. You gonna be like this? I might have to knock you down.”

“It takes a big man to hit a woman,” she notes. 

“Takes are a real big cunt to mess with me. Now move.”

“I’ll move when you do. Right down to the headmistress’s office.”

“You think I’m gonna go to Van Buren’s? You’re crazy.” He takes another side-step.

Alex blocks him, and it’s a half-second’s delay for everything to snap, but it’s enough. The kid grabs Alex by the arm and Bobby’s reflexes rev into high gear, and it’s just as the kid’s readying to forcibly push her into the wall that he’s able to grab him by the sweatshirt and drag him off. The kid hits the wall with a thudding sound and a little grunt. 

“I can deal with a lot from you students,” he informs him, twisting his arm, “but you don’t talk to a lady – never mind an officer of the law – like that.”

“Look, man – “

“Mr. Goren.”

The kid makes a tiny noise in the back of his throat. “Mr. Goren, look, I’m sorry, I was just goin’ through and she’s all up in my face. I didn’t know she’s no cop. I’m new here. I didn’t know – “

Bobby lets him go and he turns around, back flat against the wall. “I’m sorry,” he whimpers, like he’s afraid he’s going to get slugged. “I was just – “

“Apologize,” he says flatly.

“What?”

“Apologize to Officer Eames.”

The kid looks over at Alex. She’s rubbing her arm, and Bobby realizes that he must have grabbed her with all the brute force in his frame. It only makes him madder, and when he narrows his eyes, the kid spits out, “S-sorry, officer.”

Her gaze is no less flinty. “What’s your name?”

“Rob. Rob Sparks.” 

“Rob, I expect you to be waiting outside the headmistress’s office until she shows up for the day. And that you’ll explain the whole story to her on your own.”

He considers arguing, Bobby can see that in his face, but then the fire in his eyes switches off. “Yes.”

“Go.”

He practically runs for it, moving down the hall faster than anyone would suspect he physically could, and it’s only after he’s gone that Bobby looks at Alex. She’s still got a hand on her arm, even when she bends to pick up Rob’s bag, and it’s only after she puts a few of the markers back in that he says, “Here, lemme – I can get that.” He gathers it all up without looking at her, mostly because it’s easier. “I – I hope you’re not mad. I just figured, you don’t have anything on you, and if he thought you were just the custodial staff or something else, he might – “

“It’s all right,” she assures him, and when he does glance up, she’s very nearly smiling. “I was on my way in from my run and saw someone lurking around the building. I actually figured it was you.”

Bobby fumbles with the zipper on the bag and tries to come up with something to say, and it’s finally, “I’m not here this early. Not most days.”

“You are today.”

“I – today, I had something to do. Usually, I don’t have anything, I just have – “ He frowns at her. “Your arm.”

She looks at it, and some of her hair falls in her face. He’s thought too much about that hair lately, and now he can’t read her expression as she rubs her arm. “It’s just a bruise. I’ve had worse.”

“I have one of those self-cooling ice pack things in my room. I mean, all the teachers do, but I have the keys to my room.”

She grins at him. “Articulate, Mr. Goren,” and he’s certain that she’s teasing him. It makes him look at his shoes when he picks up the marker bag and leads her to his classroom. He doesn’t look at her until they’re in, the light’s on, and he’s digging around the drawer for his first aid kit, and it’s probably for the best, because when he looks up, she’s peeling out of her sweatshirt. Her back’s to him and she’s wearing a tank-top underneath, but it’s more skin that she’s ever shown him, shoulder blades and muscles under thin cotton. He stops what he’s doing to watch, and once she tosses her sweatshirt on a desk and cranes her neck to look at her arm, he realizes what he’s doing.

“Damn. That’s gonna leave a mark.” She stretches her arm and Bobby watches the angry red marks move when she flexes her muscles. It’s strange, because he’s never thought of her as a small woman until right now, when he’s standing over her, she really does look small. Almost delicate, but it feels almost uncomplimentary, because she’s a cop and not just that, she’s one of the toughest cops he’s ever met.

And she’s talking to him, which he only notices when she says, “Bobby?” and raises her head to meet his eyes. He blinks and sort of starts, and she holds out her hand. “The icepack?”

“Oh. Oh, right.” He snaps it a few times, waits for it to get cold, and puts it in her palm. “Sorry. I – sorry.”

“Your mind wandering already?” she jokes. 

Bobby steps away and heads for the board. Erasing the chalk makes him feel less guilty, but even as it does, he says, “I – I shouldn’t have stopped him. I don’t want to make you feel any less… You could have handled it. You don’t need someone to storm in and handle things for you.”

There’s a beat of pause and then he hears Alex laugh lightly. “What, you think just because I’m a cop, I don’t like a little chivalry?”

He glances at her over his shoulder. She’s leaning back against a desk and holding the icepack against her arm. It outlines her breasts perfectly and he thinks it knowing he shouldn’t think it, and thusly, turns away again. “You shouldn’t feel like you can’t deal with something, or that a man thinks you can’t deal with something. My mother, she raised my brother and I on her own from about when I was five on. I respect a woman more if she can take care of herself than if she can’t. It’s…attractive.”

The last word tumbles awkwardly from his lips and he hears it once it’s out there. It can’t be unsaid, and it means that Alex has heard it, and that now it’s floating out there in the public domain. He stops for a beat and then goes back to erasing, and when that’s done and Alex is still silent, he picks up the chalk. 

“For the record,” she says, and he stops writing when he hears her voice, “I can be a cop and still like a man to act like one. You think I slug a guy if he holds a door open or brings me flowers on a date?” 

He grins to himself. “If they had the courage to ask you out on a date, it goes without saying they’d have to have the courage to bring you flowers.” 

There’s one more beat of pause. “How much courage does someone need to ask me on a date?” 

Bobby pulls in a breath through his teeth. He needs a serious moment to consider the question, because he doesn’t know. Every time he thinks about it – and he has thought about it, several times, mostly when he’s been alone at night and unable to read or sleep – something in him freezes. He doesn’t know how to approach her. She’s not the kind of woman he’s usually attracted to. Or rather, not the kind of woman he usually approaches for a date, which makes it hard to navigate, even when he wants to move closer. 

“I – “ he begins, but there’s a tap at the door. 

“Mr. Goren?”

He glances over to see Lynn Bishop standing just inside the door, hugging her literature book to her chest. She looks at him and then at Alex, who is still leaning against the desk in her tank-top and jogging pants, and Bobby feels himself flinch. He’s always believed that a teacher’s private and public lives were separate, and his are, except for the fact that Lynn’s face tells every imaginative story she’s building up as she watches the two of them in his classroom. 

“I – Lynn. Good morning. Can I – do you need help?”

She watches Alex for a moment, who smiles but doesn’t move. “I’m stuck on the last few pages of last night’s reading,” she admits sheepishly. “I thought you had time, in the mornings, because you said – “

“I should go,” and Alex says it comfortably, moving away from the desk and grabbing her sweatshirt on the way. “Thanks for the ice pack, Bobby. And the company.” She puts said ice pack on the corner of his desk and he watches her walk out, chalk still in his hand and Lynn still standing and watching, almost wide-eyed, from the doorway. 

She’s halfway out when he remembers something and calls after her, “Wait, Eames.”

She turns around, and he smears chalk dust on his black pants when he moves to his desk, opens a drawer, and digs around again. He finds the book only after a prerequisite amount of frustration and swearing, and brings it over. “I – I don’t know if you like frontier stories,” he says, worrying the book between his hands, “but I found this, on sale, and James Fenimore Cooper is one of my favorites, and I thought – if you haven’t read _The Last of the Mohicans_ , you should, but _Pathfinder_ was always my favorite of his. So, here.”

Smiling, Alex takes the book in her hands and Bobby ends up spending the first three seconds ignoring the way her fingertips brush against his skin. “Thank you,” she says. 

“No, I – thank you. For the coffee the other day. This is – to pay you back.”

“You don’t need to.”

“No, I do.”

She leaves and when Bobby turns around, Lynn’s already in her desk with her book open, which is fine. He helps her through the reading and the students start filing in just as they finish, giving him barely enough time to scribble the rest of his notes on the board. First and second hours go by without too much to report before anything out of the ordinary happens. 

“What do you think Melville’s point was, Mr. Lupo?” he asks third hour, after watching Lupo drop his eyes to his notebook for the eighth time despite the fact that there are no new notes to write down. Someone in the back of the room snickers and Lupo turns colors just slightly, but before he can answer someone opens the door.

Rob Sparks.

He comes over to where Bobby is sitting on his desk, feet dangling and the piece of chalk he tosses between his hands in his fingers, and sets a paper cup down just to his left. Bobby looks at it. He can’t quite piece together why it’s there, or what it means, until Rob Sparks also hands over a slip of paper. 

From the way he slinks out, Bobby has a feeling this isn’t the last of his punishment from the morning. 

He knows he shouldn’t open the note – he should be asking questions about “Bartleby the Scrivener” – but he can only hold on to the little slip of neatly folded paper for so long before he has to open it. Lupo’s piecing together a half-assed sort of answer but he doesn’t hear.

Alex has very feminine handwriting, which surprises him. 

_You never said how much courage it takes._

It’s only that night, when he’s lying in bed listening to the classical station and thinking about next week’s lesson plans, that he realizes she’s talking about the courage to ask her on a date. 

Sleep’s a long time in coming, once he realizes that. 

 

==

 

Bobby spends the next few days craning his neck for Alex everywhere they usually see each other – the hallway, the cafeteria, the office – and, after entirely too long of _not_ running into her, he inquires about it at lunch. 

“She’s doing a gang taskforce meeting in the city,” James Deakins, the Spanish teacher and possibly the only one of the staff, barring Munch, Bobby really considers a friend, says over his soup. “It’s required for police liaisons at city schools.”

Fin snorts. “Gangs at Manhattan Prep. What’s the world comin’ to?”

“You’d be surprised,” and Munch says it using his spoon as a pointer. “When I was at the Columbia lab school, we had the gang-bangers in with the rich kids whose Mommies and Daddies wanted them to be Columbia legacy brats. Everybody carved South Side into a desk, even if they didn’t know what it meant.”

Huang starts rambling about gang behavior in teens, but Bobby doesn’t hear much more of it. He eats his clam chowder and goes back to his book like he’s never asked the question at all, and it’s only after lunch that Deakins catches up to him. “Did you think Alex left?” he asks in the hallway. It’s just long enough before the bell that there aren’t any students around. 

Bobby glances up from his book – he’s been re-reading _The Last of the Mohicans_ , not that anyone stops to ask him why – and shrugs. “I hadn’t seen her.”

“You don’t usually care if people disappear.”

“I – we’re friends.” The words make him feel self-conscious, like he’s fifteen again. Adults don’t talk about each other defensively, and he knows this. He closes the book so it gives his hands something to do, and then drums his fingers against the cover. “She hadn’t mentioned… I didn’t know there was a task-force meeting.”

“I only knew because Cragen asked me to cover some of the detentions.” Deakins, after Cragen and Van Buren, had been at the school the longest. “I think it came up last-minute.”

It almost sounds like a reassurance. “Okay.”

They turn two corners and Bobby’s about to open his book again when Deakins says, “It’s been a long time.”

“A long time?”

“Since you and anyone were friends.” When Bobby frowns, he grins. “I don’t mean it as an accusation. It’s good for you.”

“It’s not – “ He looks at the book again. “It’s not like that. I – she’s just someone I talk to. We have a lot in common. We get along. She likes the same kind of books and art I do, and it’s nice to have someone who isn’t you or Munch to talk to. To really talk to.”

“I hope you don’t talk to me the same way you talk to her,” and Deakins says it lightly as they get to Bobby’s classroom. He’s never been so glad to see those four walls and he starts to push the door open but Deakins stops him. “She likes you a lot,” he says abruptly, and that is what makes Bobby stop. “You won’t see it unless someone sends up flares, so I’m telling you.”

“She – I don’t know.”

“Okay.” Deakins pats him on the arm and lets him go. “See you later.”

Bobby finishes out the day and then starts his way through the next with Deakins high on the to-be-avoided list, mostly because he’s not sure what he’ll say if they see each other. He’s not sure how he’s supposed to untangle himself, and it frustrates him. He ends up running before school – running only because he has no outlet – and taking his lunch in the library, where it’s quiet and there’s no one to raise an eyebrow at him when he asks an innocent question. The problem is, he’s not particularly hungry, so he shoves his sandwich into the garbage can and takes the long way out of the building. He just wants to have a walk around campus, clear his head a little, when he sees it:

Alex leaning over a table in one of the study rooms, glaring down two slouching freshmen.

The study rooms are more-or-less soundproof and Bobby knows, at least intellectually, that detentions and meetings are often held in them. He isn’t aware – or rather, wasn’t, since he is now – that Alex used them as makeshift interrogation rooms.

One of the boys slinks lower, and in her spot against the wall, Anita Van Buren crosses her arms. Bobby recognizes him as Greg, a bit of a trouble-maker who loves the smart answer, and if that’s Greg his friend is probably Charlie, equally troublesome. He has them both in his last-hour class and now they’re both talking to Alex, who just puts her hands on the table and keeps glaring them down. There’s something about the line of her shoulders and the severity of her expression that holds his attention, and when she stands up and starts moving around the room, he’s transfixed. Knowing she’s a cop and _seeing_ her as a cop is like…knowing Hemingway is an author and then _reading_ Hemingway, discovering all the nuances and then craving more.

He isn’t sure how much time passes when the door opens and Van Buren – with Alex on her heels – steps out. “If we don’t get a straight answer by the time I’m back,” she says, “call their parents. I’ll have them withdrawn.” She glances over and notices Bobby for the first time. “Mr. Goren.”

“I – Headmistress.” Because he’s never able to call Anita anything else. His mouth can’t form the words. “I was just – “

“You have these two boys in your ninth-grade English class, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Sit in with Alex while I take a phone call. I’ll be back shortly.” There is no clearly no other option as she walks away, so Alex glances up at him and spares him a grin. 

“Feel like sweating them with me?” she asks lightly. 

He shifts his weight. “I’m not sure I know what you’re doing,” he admits.

“You’ll be fine.” She puts her hand on his arm for a half second and then walks back in, her mannerisms shifting immediately. “Okay, boys, guess what. You’re going to tell Mr. Goren your sob story all over again.”

Greg shifts in his seat. “That’s not fair.”

“What’s not fair is what you did to the class. Take it from the top.”

“We didn’t _do_ anything,” Charlie insists, glancing at and then away from Bobby. “We were doing a chem lab for Mr. Stone – “

“The stupid thing with where you have to mix stuff for precipitates,” Greg clarifies quickly. 

“ – and, I don’t know. We mixed some stuff together and I thought we had it right, but when we put it over the Bunsen burner, it all went to shit.”

Alex crosses her arms and sends him a stony look.

“Crap,” he amends. She keeps her eyes on him, and he throws up his hands. “We didn’t do it on purpose! We were just following the directions. You mix four of the chemicials, then you heat them up, and then you see if stuff – “

“Precipitates,” Greg repeats.

“ – whatever.” Charlie’s patience is waning. “You see if stuff comes out. We didn’t know it was gonna start smelling like that.”

“Like what?” Bobby asks, curious.

“Like farts.”

Which Charlie says at the same time Greg says, “Ammonium sulfide.”

Bobby nods and watches the two of them. Charlie is agitated, moving around in his seat and playing with a bit of chipped lacquer on the surface of the table but Greg isn’t. Greg slinks in his chair and scuffs his feet against the carpet, not even really looking up when Alex slides over and leans her ass on the edge of the table, watching both of them. Bobby tilts his head, and Greg steals a glance. Greg’s smart when he’s not trying to prove how smart he is. When he catches Bobby’s eyes on him, he slouches further. 

“Ammonium sulfide,” Bobby repeats. “I’m rusty on my chemistry. What is that? That’s ammonia and – “

“Sulfur,” Greg pipes up. “Except, when it’s mixed with water, it releases these fumes that smell like rotten eggs or a really bad fart.”

“You know a lot about chemistry.”

“I want to be a chemist. I went to the science academy in Ithaca when I was younger but I was, like, ten points short on the high school entrance exam so I had to go somewhere else.” 

Bobby grins at him because there’s a little streak of pride in his voice, and glances over to Alex. She grins right back and clearly picks up on his thread, because she leans forward, closer to Greg. “You probably know how to make anything.”

“Just about,” Greg boasts.

“Like a stink bomb.”

“Sure.”

For the first time, Charlie starts to sink in his seat.

“And if someone asked you,” Alex presses, “to make a stink bomb, and it would be pretty funny, you’d be tempted to do it, right?”

“Yeah, if – “ 

Greg stops.

Greg stops and there’s silence in the study room for the next thirty and then sixty seconds as Greg looks over at Charlie and Charlie, almost as red as his hair, stares right back at him. “Idiot,” he says, quite plainly.

“But – I – Mr. Goren tricked me!” Greg protests, and Bobby can’t help but grin at the tiny smile that climbs onto Alex’s lips. “I thought – he was just asking questions! That’s not fair!”

“Tell that to the headmistress,” Alex informs them, and waves her arms to usher them out. “March and I’ll suggest that she doesn’t string you up by your toenails. C’mon.”

The bell rings as they’re halfway to Van Buren’s office and it gives Bobby a chance to slip away from where he’d been taking up the rear of the little processional, watching Alex navigate the boys through the hallway and deflect Greg’s whining. There’s a certain thrill that he helped her, not that he can really explain it, and he moves through the last classes of the day with that on the back of his mind. It doesn’t help that part of him, a very small part, is thrumming from seeing her again, and if this has been four days, what would a week or a month be like?

He doesn’t think about that. They’re people who talk about books and art, people who tell stories in the hallway, and just because they spend an hour chatting every time they meet doesn’t mean anything other than they lose a lot of hours that way.

There’s a knock at the door as he’s cleaning up after his last class of the day and he calls, “Come in!” while he extricates a Snickers wrapper from between the slats on the book grate. 

“Bobby?” 

Bobby hits his head when he hears Alex’s voice.

She’s moved to pretty much the middle of the room in the time it takes him to straighten up, and she grins at him. “Hungry?” she asks, nodding to the wrapper. 

“I – oh. No. Students.” He twirls it between two fingers and then leans over to toss it in the garbage can. “They don’t always pick up after themselves. It’s part of the job. Like having children, not that I’d know.”

“You’re good with them. The students, I mean. I thought Van Buren was going to drag them to her office, kicking and screaming, and throw both of them right out of school.” She steps forward, hands in her pockets, and there’s that little grin on the edges of her lips. “You should’ve seen the look on Ben’s face. I thought his head was going to explode. I think it was the second time I ever saw emotion from him.”

Bobby tries to laugh, but with Alex so close, it comes out as a snort. “I knew Greg liked chemistry. He talks about it a lot, in my class. I just figured he didn’t really have it in him to be that malicious on his own, so it was probably Charlie’s influence.” He shifts from foot to foot, watching her. She must have come straight from the meetings downtown to school, because the shirt she’s wearing is a little lower cut and a little more…feminine…than usual and she’s got a necklace on. He feels strange and perverted for looking at her neck the way he does, but he can’t help it. He thinks about what his lips could do against that skin and forces himself to turn away and rub a smudge off the surface of one of the desks. “I’m glad I could help you.”

“It helped a lot,” she admits. There’s a long pause while he thumbs away the pencil smear. “I just wanted to thank – “

“Do you want to have dinner?” 

It comes out as a jumbled mess of words and Bobby only realizes after he forces it out that he’s interrupted her, and he glances up. There’s surprise caught on the edges of Alex’s features and for a moment, he considers taking it back, making it into a joke, or just escaping. Except he’s in the middle of the room and there are desks on three sides of him and Alex on the fourth, so unless he decides to try hurdling for the first time in his life, it’s an unlikely option. 

Finally, he says, “I’m – you were saying?”

Alex blinks and then grins at him, and it lights up her face when she does. He’s noticed it before, but never this close. “I was saying yes.”

“I – tomorrow night?” He’s still stroking the desk with his finger, because it’s keeping him from tripping over his own tongue. “I – there’s a restaurant I like. Italian. If you like Italian, I could – we could go there.”

“I love Italian.”

“Then eight o’clock? Tomorrow night, at Sal’s? I mean, if I can get us a table, but Sal, he’s a friend, and – “

“Eight o’clock is fine, Bobby,” she promises, and he’s just managing to smile at her when her walkie-talkie goes off. She pulls it off her belt and listens to the call before rolling her eyes. “More vulgarity in the boy’s room,” she mutters. “Listen, I have to go, but – “

“I’ll meet you out front. Tomorrow.” Because it’s Saturday, and he’s not likely to see her otherwise. “At eight. And I won’t worry about you slapping me if I hold open the door or bring flowers.”

There’s a half-second of pause and then Alex laughs, comfortable and free, and Bobby feels warm from his belly out.

 

==

 

“Whose funeral?” Munch asks, inviting himself in. 

Bobby shouldn’t be in his classroom. He knows this and Munch knows this, because it’s seven-forty-five on a Saturday night and everyone else has social lives. There’s a swim meet at the pool and it’s a city weekend, but he’s reading over a handful of quizzes on Herman Melville’s short stories, slouched in his seat as he marks off wrong answers.

Except he’s wearing his favorite navy suit with a collared shirt and a tie. 

Except there’s a tightly-wound handful of flowers of various colors and shapes sitting on a desk.

Except he keeps looking at his watch and – 

“Flowers?” Really?” Munch takes another step into the room and makes a face at the bunch of flowers. It’s not a bouquet. Bobby specifically asked for “more than three, less than a bouquet” and “bunch” seems like the right term. He pokes it with a finger. “If you wanna get laid that badly, I know a place on 61st Street….”

He voluntarily trails off, which is for the best, because Bobby’s put down the pen to watch him. He isn’t sure what to say. Munch has been married three times, which he reminds the rest of the staff of almost daily, and even though they’re not exactly obvious about it, everyone knows that he and Fin are involved. Even so, he’s not the type of person you take serious romantic advice from, so Bobby just sits, silently, and watches. 

“Want my advice?” Munch asks.

“No,” Bobby answers truthfully, and it makes Munch laugh.

“See? And I keep getting asked why I don’t go to the swim meets.” He sits down on the desk next to the flowers, but the conversation is more-or-less over, which gives Bobby time to finish grading one more quiz. Then, it’s seven-fifty-three, and he’s capping his pen and standing up. 

“You look like your suit got left in the dryer for a week,” Munch chides, and Bobby tries to ignore the rumpled edge to his jacket he can see when he glances down. 

“It…wrinkled,” he says after a pause.

Munch rolls his eyes. “Come here.” When Bobby doesn’t, he steps forward, pulls off his own tie pin, and tugs at Bobby’s clothes. Bobby amuses himself with the thought that he does this to Fin every time he has to dress up for an away meet or an official school function, because there’s no other reason to explain why Munch so dexterously can adjust a tie without a mirror. “There. Now at least she won’t throw you out of her car on the way _there_.”

Smiling slightly, he gets halfway to a laugh and finds he can’t bring himself to consider Munch completely funny. “You’re confident in my abilities.”

“To get your ass kicked by a chick cop, sure.” He thumps Bobby on the shoulder. “I’m going to steal a copy of _Ulysses_. I need something to read that isn’t a dog-eared _Sports Illustrated_ that’s been in the bathroom for three weeks. Go prove to all of us you aren’t a social outcast.”

“I’ll try.”

He means it when he says it, too, and when he makes it to the front of the academic building, he realizes he’s still a few minutes early – his watch is set fast – and that he’s nervous again. He shouldn’t be nervous, but he is. He can count on one hand the number of dates he’s been in on in the last several years, and most of them were either set-ups or complete accidents. All were mediocre, and he expects more than mediocre this time. He’s got flowers, he’s got reservations, he’s got – 

“Eames.”

The word falls out of his mouth and he swears it bounces on the pavement, because Alex is clearly in a rush but coming towards him anyway in a – well, it isn’t a dress. It’s a skirt, but a skirt that hugs her hips and legs and, with the shirt she wears, she hardly looks like Alex Eames at all. Her hair is a little windswept and she’s still clasping her watch, so maybe she’s not completely done up.

Actually, it makes him smile. 

“Sorry,” she apologizes, and shakes her wrist to right her watch. “One of the kids at the meet rubbed Briscoe the wrong way and I had to scare him. Hard to do in heels.” She says it lightly, but as soon as she does, some of the lightness is gone from her expression because she’s properly seeing Bobby for the first time, and that means trailing her eyes over his suit, over the flowers, over the hair that he combed twice and combed again after that in a futile attempt to make curls lie flat. She doesn’t say anything, though, just looks, and Bobby shifts. 

“I didn’t want you to slug me for lack of chivalry, either,” he decides on, once the silence is too much, and offers the flowers. She’s clearly made a real effort and he has the Russian Roulette of not-bouquets and Munch’s tie pin.

“They’re beautiful,” and there’s something about the way Alex says it that makes him believe it, whole-heartedly. Her voice is suddenly softer than usual, not the rough edge she normally has, and it’s alluring. It’s the one edge of femininity he’s never see her wearing and it’s there and then gone as she reaches into her pocket and draws out her car keys. “I’m a control freak,” she says, jangling them between her fingers. “Mind if I drive?”

He grins at her. “A-type personality.”

“Common in female cops.”

“Common in strong individuals.” He follows her to the parking lot. He knows she drives an enormous SVU, black and heavy. He’s never figured out why someone as petite as she drives something so large. Compensating for a world built on tall, dark, and handsome. “I’ve always thought too much emphasis is put on an A-type personality being a negative thing. There’s something redeeming about commanding a situation, working hard.”

She snorts. “Tell that to my mother. She’s been on my case about working too hard since I was in grade school. ‘Come on, Lexi, you can work on homework after the slumber party.’”

Bobby can’t help but laugh. “Slumber parties?”

“I was a ten-year-old girl once,” she chides, and pops the lock on the SVU. “Weren’t you ever a little boy?”

“G.I. Joes and war games in the back yard,” he retorts. 

“Your mother probably loved you.”

“My mother used to get on me about running through the house muddy. At least, early on.” 

If Alex thinks anything of his comment, she doesn’t say it, because then she’s starting the engine. Classic rock blares out of the speakers and she fumbles to turn it down, but not before he’s laughing. “Shut up,” she tells him, and the moment of tension from earlier is gone and she’s pulling out of the parking spot. 

Small talk doesn’t feel small with Alex, and as they move from the car to the restaurant – a back table that Sal has set for them, with a vase for the flowers and a slowly-burning candle, not to mention a bottle of wine he’s especially reserved for the occasion – and it’s hard not to laugh with her. She’s charming and sarcastic, wrinkling her nose at the wine (“I drink the stuff out of the box, at home,” she states while he pours, and he feels pleased deep in his stomach) and ordering gingerly off the menu, like she’s been there as many times as he has. The waitress, who knows him by name, flirts and teases, and after he orders veal parmesan and she orders lasagna, she puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”

It’s friendly and light, but Bobby looks at her and then Alex and then his menu. “She’s a colleague,” he says, but he’s not certain.

Alex hands over her menu, a motion he sees out of the corner of his eye. “It’s more-or-less our first date,” she offers. “It’s taken me a month of bringing him coffee and hanging around his classroom to get him to ask me out.”

Bobby raises his head. “That’s not fair,” he protests. 

“Why not?” She looks at him and he can tell she wants to point a finger, the way she does at a student. “Do you know how much money I’ve spent on coffees for you?”

“Six dollars and seventy-five cents, unless you’re the person who left a cup on my desk three weeks ago.” She raises an eyebrow. “Nine dollars and change, then.” 

The waitress laughs. “I’m sorry I asked!” she exclaims as she takes their menus. 

“You weren’t trying very hard,” Bobby says as she leaves, almost not paying attention to her. It’s hard to pay attention to even a pretty waitress with Alex across the table. She’s been in his mind long enough, and now, she’s in his sights. “If you wanted to have dinner, you could have asked. I would’ve gone out with you. I just… Never knew if you’d respond, before.”

“You turned me down for coffee. I thought maybe you weren’t interested.”

“No, I was interested. I wasn’t sure that I – I didn’t know how to approach you, Eames.” He scratches his temple, just for something to entertain his fingers. “I didn’t know – I thought it might be like when you’re sixteen and have a crush on a classmate. I felt like one of the students.”

Alex pauses, her glass halfway to her lips, and meets his eyes. “You can call me Alex,” she says.

“Alex,” but the syllable feels odd on his lips, like it doesn’t fit. He frowns and then asks, “Short for something? Your mother, you said, called you Lexi.”

“Alexandra.” She shakes her head. “I had a great-uncle, one of my dad’s favorites, who died in World War II. My dad was a little kid when it happened but always wanted to name his first son after Uncle Alex. When I was born – the third girl – he gave up and named me Alex instead.”

“But then you had a brother.”

“I think we all wish I hadn’t.” Because she’s told stories of her brother, in the past, and Bobby’s gathered that he’s no model citizen. 

“Alexandra,” he tries again, and this time, it feels natural.

She smiles at him. “No one calls me that. I’ve been Alex to everyone except my mom since I was four years old.”

“It suits you,” he decides. 

Dinner goes almost too quickly. They eat, they drink, they laugh and talk, and occasionally Bobby can’t help but touch her hand, or offer to refill her glass with fingertips that linger against hers, and it’s like electricity. He’s never been this fully wound by a date before, and Alex seems to both notice and not, almost as though she’s known all along and this is nothing new. 

Of course, there’s no way she could have known the things Bobby’s thought of her, in his classroom and in his bedroom, in the shower stall or just when he’s walking through the hallways and catches a glimpse of her. It’s a thought that haunts him through pasta, wine, and every second of the conversation, until they’re back in the car and driving towards the school, off the highway and through roads that almost meander, the neighborhood that surrounds them lying dark and still, after-hours. 

“Hang on,” she says, and they pass the main parking lot and then the staff lot, and Bobby watches her take a sharp left onto the campus sidewalks – all wide enough for service and emergency vehicles – and go past several buildings before parking on the patio outside the cafeteria. She climbs out and waits for him, so he slides out of his seat, too. Campus is eerily quiet and dark, with the students in the city and the swim meet long over, and he follows her off the concrete and into the grass.

The tree line isn’t far from where she’s parked, and the darkness is thicker there. She drops her bag and keys on a memorial bench – dedicated to the late Mrs. Schiff, one of the school’s two founder-donors – and stands there, letting the darkness and the cool air sink in. 

From here, Bobby can see it all: the lights that are still on in the dormitories and academic buildings, the sports fields and the sidewalks, and the few stars that aren’t blacked out by cloud-cover or smog. It’s almost beautiful, and Alex kicks off her shoes and puts them on the bench before padding through the wet grass barefoot.

“When I took this job,” she says, not really looking at him, “I was right off vice and I was just tired of everything. I was thinking about quitting the force, but my sergeant said I should take something like this, get my head on straight, and then decide what I wanted to do. The first couple weeks, I ran at night, and I always ended up here.” She glances back at him and smiles. “It’s sort of peaceful, and you can see everything. I think that’s what I like most about it. My world’s a lot smaller than it was when I was busting pimps and working deep undercover.”

Bobby watches her move through the grass like she’s always owned this spot and follows her, one half-step and then another, marring her footprints. “I like the quiet,” he admits once she’s stopped with her head tilted towards the bare, white moon. “I like places I can…sit and not have to worry too much about everyone else. I like other people, but there’s a limit. A…critical mass.”

She looks at him but says nothing. They’re a foot apart, maybe two, and he can feel her eyes on him with every inch that disappears. 

“You don’t make me feel that way,” he continues, and it’s quiet. “I don’t feel… I don’t feel like there’s too much.”

“It’s all right if you do,” and Alex’s voice is closer than he expects it to be, almost right under him, right in his shadow.

It means when he leans forward, he’s there, against her, and his hand can find its way to her lower back. It means that when he bends, he’s kissing her, the softest press against her lips. He can feel his heart in his chest, pounding, but it only lasts for seconds. Maybe it’s because he’s calming down or maybe it’s because Alex’s arms are looping around his neck, he doesn’t know, but suddenly there are fingernails against the short hairs at the back of his neck and he’s pulling her closer, bodies flush and his tongue finding hers, and if there’s one thing that Alex knows, it’s kissing. It’s slithering close until he can feel every inch of her body in his arms and it’s pulling his tongue into her mouth, loose and languid and invigorating, and he can’t keep his hands from sliding down her body, from her back to her side and then low on her hips, forcing her belly against his groin and ensuring that she feels what all this – the conversation, the laughter, the proximity, and her mouth – has drummed up in him.

When they pull apart, when they breathe, he only drags in a few greedy gulps of air before he tips his head to taste her neck, to finally press his lips and then tongue to her pulse point, to draw a sound from her lips that is so greedily wanton he’s guilty of wondering if who might see them out here, if he pushed her onto the bench and dropped to his knees. 

He feels dirty for thinking it, but his cock is hard against her heat and twitches at the momentary fantasy. 

“Bobby,” and her breath is a little gasp while her fingers slide through his hair, nails on his scalp, mussing up the curls he’s tried to control. He puts his cheek against her skin and knows she must feel his stubble, never mind his breath on her neck and his arousal pressing against the soft flesh of her stomach. His leg is almost between hers, and it’s only now that he realizes that she’s pressed against him there, too, full contact hampered only by her skirt. When she moves away, it’s to look at him with dark eyes. “Do you want – “

“Yes,” he says, and he doesn’t feel fifteen in this moment. He feels every year of his age and he doesn’t let go of her even when he brings her over and picks up her bag and keys. “You don’t – you’ll never have to ask. Yes.”

It’s “yes” he whispers to her, too, when they skip over the awkward first impressions – the bookshelves that are overflowing, the coffee pot with the dredges of that morning’s sludge, the rumpled suit-coat dangling from a hanger on the back of his bedroom door – to lie on his linens, to peel away clothes like armor and leave them on his bedroom floor. When he slides down her body, he counts freckles with his teeth and she whimpers every time he nips at pale skin, until he’s spreading her legs and scraping stubble along the insides of her thighs. She moves with him, wriggles and digs fingernails into his scalp and shoulders, and he watches the way her chest heaves as she teeters on the edge.

The way she says his name when she comes nearly makes him lose what little self-control he still has. 

Her hands never leave his skin, either, and he thinks things he shouldn’t when he’s climbing over her and kissing her clavicle, her neck, her lips, all messy and greedy and desperate because he’s spent so many sleepless nights thinking about her, like this, spread out on his sheets and rubbing her skin against him, not necessarily obscenely but still nothing close to clean. He thinks about how small she feels under him, how delicate, and how, despite that, he just wants to abandon all his sense in her. He thinks about the way her expression shifts, changes, and the way she says his name, over and over like a mantra, like something she’s never been allowed to say before this night. He imagines her propped up against pillows in her room in the girl’s dormitories, her head tipped back and her fingers busy as she thinks of him, and it’s the first time he knows, not wonders, that she has, because her legs slide around his waist and pull him deeper in a way that tells him, without a doubt, that she’s had this moment on her mind as long as he has.

He’s overwhelmed entirely too fast, but then, the room smells like sex and like Alex and when she comes again, throaty moans in his ear, there’s nothing more he can do. It’s not her name on his lips, not this time – those times are saved for the shower or late nights – but rather just a breathless cacophony of tiny sounds. He doesn’t have the peace of mind, the energy, the strength to form an entire word, even if it’s only “Alexandra.”

He lies next to her on the sheets they never bothered pulling back and watches her watch him, her eyes half-lidded and lazy under dark lashes, her fingers sliding over his arm. He’s not able to stop touching her, not even when she bats his hand away from her leg and complains that she’s going to have stubble burn in the morning, and he keeps his palm against the space between her breasts. He can feel her breathe, feel her heartbeat, and it’s comforting.

He rarely feels so comfortable. 

“You really should have asked me to dinner earlier,” she chides, and reaches up to toy with the hairs that fall onto his forehead. “I would have said yes just for dessert.”

Bobby snorts, pauses, and then laughs, putting his face against her shoulder and practically giggling until the force of it shakes the whole bed. She laughs right with him, though, and it’s easy and smooth, like they’ve done this a thousand times.

Maybe they have, and he doesn’t know it.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he murmurs to himself, and she glances in his direction. “Sorry, I – I had a thought, was all.”

“I thought you were commenting on this, and I was going to say, I’m pretty sure I’d remember if it wasn’t the first time.”

He glances up and grins. “Just wait until the second.”

“Trust me. I will.”

 

==

 

The first bell’s only just rung and the second, three minutes later, is looming in the future but Bobby isn’t paying attention to that as he scribbles the free-write prompt of the day – EXPLAIN YOUR UTOPIA – on the board. His seniors who are already present – most the class, because they’re conscientious – groan in unison and he listens to the _snap-snap-snap_ of binder rings opening and paper being pulled out. 

“You,” he reminds them without looking back, “picked _Brave New World_. Not me.”

“But the prompt sucks,” Stabler complains.

“The prompt asks for something simple. Your perfect world. If you can’t piece together a perfect world, how do you have any indication of an imperfect world? We all know what we want, ideally, and I’m asking you to put that into words. I think you can formulate at least one thought that – “

There’s a rap at the door and he glances over to see Alex standing there, smiling at him, holding a paper cup of coffee. It’s the fourth this week, which makes it a record, and he smiles at her when she brings it in. She’s back to jeans and sweaters that are slightly formless, school security garb, but he no longer expects or requires pencil skirts. Especially since, when he’d woken up that morning, she’d been in one of his t-shirts and talking on her cell phone to Van Buren.

(Another slur on a bathroom stall. Her work is never done.)

“Coffee,” she says plainly, and hands it over. Their fingers barely touch, but he smiles as a thank-you, and it’s enough to set off a group of girls in the back corner. They giggle and Alex discreetly rolls her eyes before she turns around and walks out. 

Bobby finishes the sentence on the board in between sips of fresh coffee, and when the second bell rings, he turns around. “So, you’re formulating your – “

“Mr. Goren.” Casey Novak’s hand is high in the air.

“Yes?”

She pauses, hand hovering there, and glances at Lynn Bishop. Lynn nudges her. “Are you and Officer Eames going out?”

The cup is halfway to his lips when she asks the question and Bobby stops, considering the question. Alex is standing in the hallway outside his room talking to Ed Green – Ed Green, who is not currently in his class, and from the looks of it is harried and running late – and she glances away to make eye contact with him. He smiles at her, she smiles back, and in a way, that’s an answer. 

Except the girls are still watching him and, come to think of it, so are some of the other students, although be it genuine interest in his personal life or genuine _dis_ interest in the assignment, he doesn’t know.

He shifts his weight, looks at the color, and then, finally, sips the coffee. It’s from Perk Place, his favorite coffee shop. It’s the coffee that started it all. 

“Utopia,” he informs them, because the tips of his ears feel warm and, thanks to the coffee, so does the rest of him., “comes from two Greek words: _ou_ , which means not, and _topos_ , place. The idea is that it’s a place that isn’t real, but that there’s perfection to it, and authors like Huxley believed that we could potentially find it. Someday. Maybe.” He shrugs at Casey, who looks decidedly disgruntled. “You never know.”


End file.
